EDIT: Double post.  This site really drives me crazy.

For FPS games fps is the be all and end all.

Try flipping your POV 180° in a fraction of a second and see how 30fps gets you disorientated due to drawing lag.

For FPS games 100fps is about the minimum usable for serious combat.

Anyone who thinks WOW is a pro game needs to get out more...

The 5870 is nice.

But for my nephew's current dream machine I opted for the 5970.

Nearly as good as 2 5870's, but in a single slot with less cost than two 5870's. And he has the option of adding another.

Here are the specs of his 'wish machine':

Thermaltake Spedo VI9000
Intel Core i7-920
Kingston HyperX 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
MSI X58 Pro-E
Thermaltake Toughpower W0133RU 1200W
Diamond Radeon HD5970 2GB PCI-Express Video Card
Intel X25-M 160GB (SSD)
Seagate 500GB Serial ATA/300 16MB Buffer Retail Hard Drive Kit - ST3500641AS-RK
Microsoft Sidewinder X8 Gaming Mouse with BlueTrach Technology
Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
Samsung 2243SWX 21.5" 1080p Widescreen LCD Monitor
Plextor Internal 6X Blu-Ray Combo Super Multi Drive

Win7 Pro x64 as the OS

I haven't spec'd out a system in several years, but this combination seems (to me) to be about the best for a ~$3,000 system that is for gaming. Any suggestions are welcome.

Maybe he means pro because once you start playing WoW, you leave all other professions behind!

Definitely a nice card. I'm going to stick with my year and a half old GTX280 until N'Vidia puts out a new "Top of the Line" though. N'Vidia and ATi always bounce back and forth between who's on top. N'Vidia's next one will trounce this one, ATi's one after that will trounce that one, etc etc. I stick with N'Vidia. You can't argue with the power of the new ATi card though. It's definitely the current king of the hill.

If I may:

I'm really debating picking this or the 5850 up to replace my 260GTX.  Loved my nvidia card, but its upgrade time.

Nice to see that people get new graphiccards every other year

PCPrincess

"Still using"??  You make it sound like it's something old you can throw to the dogs. Yes I still got my GeForce 8800GTS 512MB G92....

Every other year? lol It would be nice if I had the money to build a new rig "every other year". Try every 4-5 years if I'm lucky. Putting down $500 = for a graphics card isn't always that easy. I plan on using my current card for at least another 2 years, maybe 3 depending on this economy.

That sounds like me. I had a 128MB Geforce 6800OC I held onto till just over a year or so ago(along with an XP3000 CPU). I finally broke down and grabbed a Phenom and GTX260 when I started finding games I couldn't meet the minimum on. It will probable be another 3 or more years before planning to upgrade again. I mean why would I? I haven't found anything I can run at max for my res. yet so it would just seem to be a waste of money at this point.

I'll mention the mouse to him, but I think he is set on the Sidewinder.

And I don't want to cut corners with the PSU, as he may add a second video card later on. Better safe than sorry, since that video card can consume nearly 300W all by itself.

IslandDog, I want to warn you about something. I think DeskScapes 3 may have a problem with Radeon cards. I'm using a Radeon HD 5850, running the latest 10.2 drivers and the latest DS3 (v3.10). To reproduce the problem I had, set your desktop to the "Planktonic" dream in DS3, run a game (I used RE5) and benchmark it. Now, disable DS3 altogether and set a static wallpaper from Windows Explorer just to be sure. Then, run the same game and benchmark it. You'll see the scores are much higher with DS3 off.

I noticed this problem when I was playing Bioshock 2 when framerates someimtes went below 40. It never went below 60 FPS when I was using my GTX 260 so 5850 shouldn't be going below 40. So I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and fired up MSI Afterburner to check the clocks and sure enough, they were running at 400 MHz Core and 900 MHz Memory which are settings ATI drivers use for 2D rendering. The clocks should have been at 725 MHz Core and 1000 MHz Memory (825 & 1200 for 5870). And then I remembered that DS3 uses the graphics card to play dreams so I disabled DS3 and restarted the game. This time the game ran perfectly at 60 FPS with no slowdowns. Then I set the dream to "WS Caustic Cude" (which is a wmv dream which only uses CPU to play it) and ran Bioshock 2 again. There were no problems since DS3 was not using the graphics card to play the dream. I tested a dynamic dream and no problems with it either. So I'm assuming that it happens only with MPG dreams but not with WMV and dynamic dreams.

I think the problem here is, although DS3 pauses the dream when a fullscreen game is running, it's still using the graphics card somehow. Therefore, the Catalyst driver still runs the card at 400 MHz Core and 900 MHz Memory, even when we launch a 3D game when the driver should upclock the card to 725 & 1000. The driver probably thinks that we're running a 2D game or something. I don't know who to complain this to: ATI or Stardock but I kinda think it has to do with DS3.

P.S. Other Radeon users may also have this problem so could those of you with 4xxx cards please test this out?

Look what you've done Islanddog, now you can't work with Stardock software anymore!

You could just set a gaming profile to force max 3d speeds.

I've got two profiles in Afterburner but I'm using an MSI BIOS with an XFX card to get past clock limitations. The advantage with this is the driver downclocks when the card is idle. However it creates a problem with DS3 like I said.

If I use the original XFX BIOS and edit Afterburner's config file to overvolt and overclock, it works fine but the card always runs at full clocks whether 2D or 3D or idle so I have to switch profiles all the time. There is indeed the option to set 2D and 3D profiles seperately in Afterburner but it doesn't work as well as the driver doing it (the driver downclocks to 157 MHz Core and 300 MHz Memory when idle).

Today, I tried playing some MKV files through the gfx card using Media Player Classic while playing Bioshock 2 and had the same problem. Even if I started the game first, Alt-Tabbed and played the MKV file, the driver downclocks to 400, 900 as soon as the movie starts and even after it was paused. If I stop the movie, however, the clocks go back to normal.

The problem I think is the driver doesn't seem to know if a movie/dream is paused or not so I guess it's not entirely DS3's fault. One possible solution on DS3's part would be to stop the dream altogether when a game is loaded instead of pausing it.

Afterburner, is just a reskin of riva, and if i understand correctly doesn't really support the force clocks feature of riva, because it scares powerplay. Riva lets you force full clock speeds by just checking and option. Definately a bad idea for all the time but situationally effective.

Yeah, there is no direct way in Afterburner to force clocks. I can do it by setting "EnableUnofficialOverclocking" to 1 in the Afterburner config file but PowerPlay gets disabled. I want to use Rivatuner but it doesn't support 5xxx cards directly so I'm sticking with the next best thing for now.

Graphics cards is probably the only area where the common reaction to it being broken is "as long as I can circumvent it and it's faster than my neighbours', I'll use it".